If Oscar Voters Did the Right Thing

Back in 1989, Oscar voters had the opportunity to spotlight a complex vision of race relations in America by voting for Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, a film that asked honest questions about hate as tensions ran high among blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn.

Somehow Do the Right Thing wasn't even nominated, and instead the Academy awarded Driving Miss Daisy Best Picture, to let us know that white folks and black folks are getting along just fine. They can even be friends now.

The Academy has a not dissimilar opportunity to spotlight complexity this year with Zero Dark Thirty, a gritty film about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden that some are calling torture porn, but which actually asks valid questions about American policy and the lengths to which the government is willing to go to protect its citizens. We got our man, but have we done the right thing?

Torturers go home to their families, kiss their children, and lead otherwise normal lives. It is not immoral to point out this fundamental human contradiction. In fact, it is profoundly moral. We need to know who we are and what we are capable of.

Instead, the Best Picture award is likely to go to either Argo or Lincoln, two very good films that spend their screen time reminding Americans of all the good things we've done throughout history, while frequently passing over the tragedies it took to get us there. Human contradiction is not what they're about. There are good guys and there are bad guys, and in the end the good guys win. Americans are safe, blacks are free, and everything is right in the world.

So torture porn will lose out to nostalgia porn. Of course, this shouldn't surprise anyone who gritted their teeth when The King's Speech, a biopic about a man who overcomes an inability to communicate to his subjects, beat out The Social Network, a film about the way the world now communicates. Or when Traffic lost to Gladiator. Or when The Artist won anything at all. It's not news that Oscar voters don't like to ruffle feathers, so I've learned to take the awards with a heap of salt and wait to see how history remembers the films. We'll never forget Lincoln, the man. But in twenty years, Zero Dark Thirty will be the 2012 film that stays with us all. That should be the true mark of a Best Picture.

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